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THE ART OF DELAYED GRATIFICATION Refinishing the automobile with pride BY STEFANO LIESSI
W
ay back, during a time where people paid with cheques and wrote letters of correspondence on birch bark, I used to go shopping for groceries with my mother. As a child, I hated this task, so my buy-in was the acquisition of a magazine at the checkout. A Hot Rod or Car Craft magazine—some of which I still retain to this day.
Yes, I was going to paint cars when I got older. This was a certainty, as there was absolutely nothing cooler than the flames, scallops, stripes, and candies that graced the cover of these publications monthly. This is what I wanted to do for a living, a career, to have my work on the cover of a magazine, custom painting. Much has changed over the years in our industry. Who would have thought that the candies of yester-year could be the actual factory finish on a vehicle that you buy brand-new, and who would have thought that the pearls and metallics would have the depth and shine out the door that they do. If one thinks back real hard, the lacquer and single stage metallics of yester-year had the depth of a tablecloth. Now if you haven’t guessed it by now, my beginnings in refinish are dated to times when the flash off of a coat of paint was timed by having a cigarette outside the booth, mainly on the multiple “overall” or “complete” refinishes we would do. It was not uncommon to do a full paint job on a vehicle that was a family grocery getter. My father had his ’75 Olds’ Delta 88 refinished and patched up three times over its lifespan, with each time coming home with a surface texture, and depth, that resembled citrus fruit. This, however, was deemed acceptable to the masses. My training back then was live and on the floor. Started with prepping using lacquer primer and putty, sanding with a jitter bug sander sporting P180 on the hand numbing, chrome eating, window scratching, air-driven mechanical wonder. Masking all the trim, handles, chrome, and even the name plates—yes
The expense of learning back then was minimal. Today, the skill and technical knowledge far exceeds that of “tinting by eye”. We need let down panels, we need spray out cards, we need to be 100 percent informed on what the manual and SOP from the paint manufacturer say. name plates, my favorite being the“Park Avenue” or “Buick Electra” script, so lovingly created by the General and shared with AMC. Masking tape, no fine line, not even quarter inch at the time. Let us not forget the wonders of lacquer finish that GM flogged to the very end, not to mention the dispersion lacquer used on the Grand Nationals…. Sand it down with P400, spray some primer hoping it wouldn’t wrinkle, then bake it under the lights only to have it re-flow and come out looking like deep wet black paint, lets sand all over again. Then off into the crossflow booth with puddles of water on the floor from wetting it down to keep the dust down from the prep-
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pers sanding just inches away from the filters. There it was, in all its glory, the “North American Land Yacht” in all its prepped beauty, ready for a coat of high-end, single stage acrylic enamel. The test of a good painter back then was if you could spray a single stage metallic light blue without the trademark visual of tiger stripes and clouds (modeling or blotchiness). Also, could you get the center of that hood as wet and shiny as the sides, without leaning into the wet finish on the fender. And just as you thought it was all over, there was that fly that would find its way into the fresh surface of that beautiful Olympic pool sized hood only to succumb to the fumes and
